Issue 29 | Spring 2010

The current festival devoted to the films and art of Sergei Paradjanov in London and Bristol is the most comprehensive ever mounted in this country and was a long overdue celebration of this most persecuted and visionary of directors. Those two attributes imply a martyrdom that was belied by Paradjanov’s joie de vivre, as evidenced by the vivacity and inventiveness of his films, the prodigality of his gifts and the spiritual generosity and conviviality of his daily existence, clearly visible in the intimate photographs taken by his friend Yuri Mechitov, mounted in an exhibition at the National Theatre.

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With his controversial and briefly celebrated Malenkaya Veruschka (known in England as Little Vera), Vasili Pichul leaves the coddled Western viewer numbed and suffocated by the smothering dependence of the nuclear family, aggravated and unnerved by their silent suffering and their deafening conflicts.

The first man is Adolfas Mekas, filmed by his brother Jonas; an image that appears in the first reel of Lost, Lost, Lost, his 1976 assembly of a quarter of a century of footage, described as ‘some images, some sounds, recorded by someone in exile’

Robert Redford was keen to stress at the opening press conference his desire for the Sundance Festival to return to its roots. The slogans at the start of each film proclaimed “This is the renewed rebellion” …

Every year, refugees inexorably beach on the Spanish coasts. At times it’s like they’ve always been there, as if they were part of some sort of strange rites of spring, irrevocably doomed to be washed up on the shores of my land. Nameless faces haunting my thoughts…

To anyone who knows it only from their own knock-kneed, deskbound performance in the schoolroom, Bill Naughton's drama Spring and Port Wine sticks in the memory as a dry, two-dimensional tale of domestic patriarchy...